The fastest-growing black hole ever discovered gulped the equivalent of our sun every two days and emitted huge amounts of x-rays that would have made life impossible on Earth, even if the space cave-in was located as far away as the center of our Milky Way galaxy, Space.com reported.

Luckily, this black hole is too old and too far away to affect Earth, but that doesn’t make its discovery any less remarkable.

("A black hole is a region of spacetime exhibiting such strong gravitational effects that nothing -- not even particles and electromagnetic radiation such as light -- can escape from inside it," per Wikipedia.)

Researchers said this particular black hole likely released its light about 12 billion years ago, when the phenomenon was about the size of 20 billion suns and was growing by one per cent every million years.

The energy emitted from the newly discovered black hole was mostly ultraviolet, but it also radiated massive amounts of x-rays that would prevent life on Earth from surviving.

The supermassive black hole was initially found by the SkyMapper telescope at the ANU Siding Spring Observatory, which detected its light as near-infrared, with the help of The European Space Agency's Gaia satellite. The black hole was then confirmed through the spectrograph on the ANU 2.3 meter telescope that can split colors into spectral lines.

The discovery could help astronomers learn about the formation of early galaxies, Wolf said.

The fastest-growing black hole ever discovered gulped the equivalent of our sun every two days and emitted huge amounts of x-rays that would have made life impossible on Earth, even if the space cave-in was located as far away as the center of our Milky Way galaxy.